BP Unfiltered

New Season, New Cards

Since we released the new PECOTA cards, I've gotten several requests for a link back to the DT cards like the one we used to have. Instead of doing that, we're going to throw the DT cards away entirely, because (as we've both known ourselves and been reminded of by people for a while now) it's silly to have two sets of cards.

Click here to see the index of the new "unified" player card, with career, translated, and PECOTA data all in one place. You can navigate these cards through the index page and find individual players by typing in the "Search" field at the top right of the index. This will filter based on what you type, so type "Gwynn" to see the Gwynn family hitters. Once you are looking at a card, you can also click the year or team columns to get to that team's page and see other players on that year's squad--here are the extremely entertaining 1991 Detroit Tigers, for example. You can also use the standard Player Search box at the top of any page frame at Baseball Prospectus to find a player.

These cards feature the following:

All columns are sortable. Click a header to sort by that column.

If a player has PECOTA data available, it'll be in the card. If a player has Standard and Davenport Translation data available, it'll be in the card. If he has both, it'll all be displayed in one card. As usual, PECOTA projections are only available for Baseball Prospectus Premium and Fantasy subscribers (except for New York Yankees, who can all be seen for free this year).

We've expanded the references to BP articles, chats, and roundtables at the bottom of the cards. They page (if necessary; look at the bottom of the table to see how many entries are available) and sort by column.

We are aware of the following issues with these cards:

players before 1900 have career lines but not seasonal lines represented in their cards. For an example, see Roger Connor's card.

we don't have all the totals data right for pitcher Standard lines. You'll see zeroes and question marks.

We've got a lot more data that we're working on integrating into these cards, so chances are if you want to see something we've already got it in the roadmap, but please let us know your thoughts on any aspect of these cards in the comments.

This is terrible; *please* bring back the DT cards. I can't see the full data on players fromt the past, as your Roger Connor card demonstrates. I'm used to downloading data from the cards, and don't know how to do this now. And, as jessehoffins writes, WARP2 and WARP3 seem to be gone.

Please re-think this decision. I am a subscriber, and will certainly cancel my subscription if nothing is done.

Yes, there is a lot of data from the DT cards that is missing from the new cards--not just WARP2/3 but *all* the defensive info. There doesn't seem to be any way, even, to determine what positions a player has played.

Dave, the new stat cards are a great addition to the site (I love the sortable columns for example) but I really hope that soon 100% of the DT card data will be available *somewhere* on the site.

Looks reasonable to me. It was a very low-scoring environment. The 1980 NL league average ERA was 3.61.

Strikeouts don't contribute to WARP, and they shouldn't. A high ratio of outs recorded to baserunners and total bases allowed is what gets you a high pitching WARP. Strikeouts are just a particularly good means to the end of recording outs without giving up bases and runs. And in any case, he had 200 Ks in 1980, not 275 =P

Ryan has something of a 2-note historical record: longevity and strikeouts. Don't forget he holds the record for most batters walked by almost 1000. I don't find it remotely surprising that he's far down on the career WARP list.

A note on the site's player search feature. Used to be you could type in a last name, "rodriguez" for instance, and get a long list. All the active players had both a PECOTA card and a DT card. Inactive players just had the DT card. That actually made it easier to scan the list to find the player you were interested in. Is there any way to have active players listed in bold, as is done at baseball-reference, so that they are more easily distinguishable?

Is there a plan to include current year stats right on the player cards? I think that would be incredibly useful. In general, while I'm sure there will be some tweaking done to exactly what information is shown, I love having the historical stats right in the PECOTA cards. It's a feature that I have always thought would make the PECOTA cards more useful, eliminating the need to go back and forth between PECOTA and DT cards.

Love everything that's new, but miss the specific defensive stats such as FRAA, etc... I liked seeing how all the metrics added up to the WARP. Could we have a tab that says "expanded" or "DT detailed stats" or something like that?

There's a whole lot to love about the new cards. However, I have three suggstions:

1. I second what PopTarts said above. I like to see the components involved in WARP, mainly because I am more skeptical of the defensive metrics than the offensive ones, so when I compare two players' WARP scores I like to see what kind of role defensive measurements played in any differences.

2. Again stated by somebody above, but I really miss the accounting of the number of games a player put in at each position. Will this be rectified when the new defensive stats are rolled out?

3. Wasn't there some sort of measurement previously of how good a comp each of the "10 most comparable players" are? And also an overall number indicating whether the comps are close or not close? That is an important number for me.